Backstory: Making the Large Hadron Collider Pop-Up Book

Photograph: Christian Stoll

Pop-up books have always been the exhibitionists of the literary world—all those creases and protrusions. In Voyage to the Heart of Matter, Emma Sanders applies the in-your-face form to science: the Large Hadron Collider. It took CERN 12 years to build the subatomic smasher, and it took Sanders two years to re-create the folded-paper mini-me. She enlisted pop-up genius Anton Radevsky to painstakingly transform the LHC’s many elements into pulp sculpture, but they needed a lot of technical assistance—nearly 40 physicists provided scientific guidance, photos, and sketches of various parts of the $9 billion science experiment.

The scale of the paper particle detector is exact, and you put it together as you read through the book. The process mimics construction of the real collider (except you won’t need an enormous crane). “I nearly created a political incident, because I almost missed one of the magnets,” Sanders says. In the underground version, this magnet is made up of 5.5 miles of wire, but on paper it’s practically imperceptible. “It’s very skinny, but it’s there.”

Why go to all this trouble? Well, before the collider opened, tens of thousands of visitors packed in to see it. Now that it’s up and running, however, the facility is generally off-limits. “To a lot of people, the experiments at the LHC might as well be a black box,” Sanders says. “They’re very excited about it, but they don’t have a clue how it works.” This book makes the science accessible. Dark matter—visible at last!